MS Access Database for County Public Water and Sewer District [Case Study]

April 29, 2013By GoZapIt: The Original Cincinnati Web Design And Development Company

The Challenge: Better Approach for Managing New Construction Projects

When planning for a new land development project, the water and sewer plans must adhere to strict state and local regulations and can cost millions of dollars. Throughout the project development phases, there are hundreds of petitions, checklists, planning notes, meeting minutes, and approval documents. Thus, the manual process was expensive and hard to manage. Each project was managed using a separate file folder package, and there could be several projects running at the same time, which increased the need for a technology solution.

The Solution: A Database-Driven Engineering Project Management System

Taking the time to step through the entire process with the County Sanitary Engineer and his staff allow us to develop a custom MS-Access solution that could track and report multiple projects. There were over 300 data elements to capture, so the database was designed for efficiency by grouping similar data elements into their respective tables. There are three main phases in a county public water and sewer project: Pre-Construction, Construction, and Post-Construction. Within each phase, there are several sections, so we used a two-tiered tab system.

Below is an example of one of the forms.

MS-Access screen displaying the Plan-Approval Steps in the Pre-Construction Phase

The Benefits: Client Cost Savings Easy Access to Project Data

With easy access to the project database, the County Sanitary Engineer, and his staff can quickly and easily view the status of all projects and then address the projects that need their attention.